Habit for a Habit
by Annabell Archer
Summary: Molly didn't like it in uni. The girls around her always made her feel fat, no matter how hard she tried to get skinny. One day a certain curly-haired boy found out.


Molly felt the bile coming up as she retched again. She had been throwing up in the female bathroom for 15 minutes. She wasn't sick, she did this often. Ever since she started attending Uni, she had started to feel like all the other girls were skinnier than her. So she had tried to start dieting, but it was hard, so she always wound up bringing it all back up in the bathroom. As she finished and flushed, she went over to the sink to try to make sure that her face held no evidence.

Molly looked around, confirming that she was indeed alone, and breathed a sigh of relief. The last thing she wanted for someone to see her in this state. After a few minutes of fixing her hair and splashing cold water on her face, the door opened, causing her to jump. She trained her eyes on the floor, expecting to hear the chatter of a group of girls, or at least a pair of feet pattering to the stall, but instead she looked up to see a tall, thin boy with a mess of curly black hair looking at her. In the girls room. A boy. An attractive boy. Molly immediately looked down again and fidgeted with her clothing self-consciously. Oh, why couldn't she be as skinny as the other girls?

But as the seconds ticked by she felt her face grow hot as the boy didn't leave, or even move at all. Finally she stammered out, "You're… you're in the wrong… the wrong toilet."

"No, I'm not," a deep baritone voice answered, "I meant to come in here."

Molly looked up in surprise, "Why?"

"I needed somewhere private," he said pulling out a cigarette and lighting it. Cigarettes weren't allowed, and certainly not in the wrong bathroom, "the boy's room was full of people, so I came here. I knew that it was empty or near empty. More than one girl is never this quiet."

Molly wanted to leave, as she detested the smell of the smoke, but she found herself unable to move as the boy's blue eyes stayed trained on her, even as he lit and began smoking his cigarette.

There was silence in the girls' bathroom for a while, before he spoke again, causing Molly to jump. "You know, you really don't need to lose weight. I would advise you to stop throwing up so frequently."

Molly just gaped, how did this strange boy know? She'd never met him before and she hadn't even told her best friend, Martha, about her purging. "How…"

"I could smell it quite strongly, so strong that someone must have thrown up in the last ten minutes, and, as I said earlier, you are the only one here. Furthermore, you do not seem affected by this fact, so you must do it often. Not for a disease or similar, if it was you would go to the nurse, but you don't plan to, or you would have left already, therefore you must have bulimia. Which is a rather terrible habit, you know."

Molly once again returned her attention to her shoes, feeling her face turn a deeper shade of red. "Well, so is smoking." she said quietly, feeling a bit defensive.

The boy hesitated, but only for a second. "Yes, but if you're going to be a Pathologist, you'll want to make sure you aren't mistaken for a dead body." said the boy, flicking some of his cigarette ash onto the floor.

"How-"

"I can see the biology book in your bag, but I know that you aren't working with any animals because it's on human biology exclusively, but if you were going to be a doctor you'd also have a chemistry textbook, with that being required for medicine. Plus, I'm going into criminal science and forensics myself, so I've seen you around the halls."

Molly blinked. So this boy wanted to be a detective. "Well, I think you'll have trouble working on a big case if you're stuck thinking about when and where your next smoke will be." replied Molly, but she was losing her nerve fast.

The boy considered this for a while. His cigarette had gone out, but he didn't seem to have noticed. "How about this, uh…"

"Molly Hooper."

"… Molly. I'll quit smoking if you stop binging and purging. A habit for a habit. Deal?"

Molly's eyes snapped up, and she gazed at the strange boy. He seems to be serious, with his icy eyes looking calmly back at her. She had no reason to accept. She'd probably never see the boy again. He wouldn't even know if she quit, and she wouldn't know if he did. To accept would be irrational, and illogical, and "deal."

The boy smirked a bit, as if he followed her train of thought. "Wonderful. I'm Sherlock Holmes, by the way. Maybe I'll see you in the halls." And with that, the boy turned on heel and left. Molly was left staring after him in shock for a few moments before a group of girls entered, laughing and talking and fixing their makeup, causing Molly to shyly slip from the bathroom as quickly as possible, fidgeting with her clothing again.

"Yeah." She said quietly to herself. "Maybe I'll see you again."


End file.
